Liquid crystal materials have been exploited very successfully for use in display applications, but their potential in telecommunications devices for optical fibre systems has only recently become the focus of extensive research1,2,3,4,5,6,13. Thermotropic liquid crystals have advantages over conventional electro-optic telecoms materials such as lithium niobate in that they have high birefringence, high optical transparency, low power consumption, non-mechanical operation, and are cheap and simple to manufacture.
The main area in which liquid crystal devices suffer in comparison is their relatively low switching speeds, typically tens of milliseconds. It is for this reason that the more promising liquid crystal telecommunications devices attempt to either utilise faster liquid crystal electro-optic effects than the simple Freedericksz transition, such as ferroelectric and electroclinic effects13, or address applications which require switching at well below the bit-rate of the system, such as switchable interconnects1,2 add/drop multiplexers,3 or polarization control.4,5,6,11 
The flexoelectro-optic effect8,9 however, remains unexplored from a telecommunications standpoint, despite being a very fast switching mechanism with linear electric field response and temperature independence over the nematic range in certain materials. This may be because switching of the optic axis purely within the plane of the cell requires careful control of the state of polarization of the light entering the device in order to produce a consistent effect, which is undesirable in a fibre-optic system.